Issues and Impact of Technology
Environmental, ethical, cultural and privacy impacts of computing, emerging technologies, and a structure for the extended answer that carries the largest marks on Paper 1.
Environmental impact
The costs
Manufacturing. Devices need rare earth metals, and extracting them uses large amounts of energy and water and frequently causes serious pollution and human harm in the areas where mining happens.
Energy in use. Data centres consume very large quantities of electricity, both to run the servers and to cool them, and demand grows every year as more services move online.
Electronic waste. Devices are replaced long before they stop working. Much e-waste is exported and dismantled by hand without protection, releasing lead, mercury and cadmium into the ground and into the people doing the work.
The benefits
Fewer journeys. Video conferencing and remote working remove commuting and business travel, and the carbon saved is substantial.
Less material. Digital documents, tickets, statements and music remove paper, plastic and physical distribution.
Better efficiency elsewhere. Smart meters, route optimisation for delivery fleets and automated building controls all reduce energy use by more than the computing they need consumes.
An evaluate question about environmental impact that gives only the costs cannot reach the top band. The genuine position is that computing has significant costs and enables significant savings, and the question is whether the savings outweigh them in the case described.
- Mining rare metals damages land.
- Making a device uses energy, water and chemicals.
- Using it needs electricity, including at the data centres.
- Throwing it away creates e-waste, with toxic metals in landfill.
- Recycling recovers materials, which go back into making new devices.
- Reduce, reuse and recycle, in that order of importance.
Ethical, cultural and privacy issues
Privacy
Almost every service collects data, and much of it is collected as a by-product of use rather than being asked for. Location history, search terms, purchase records and messages together build a picture more detailed than most people realise they have given away.
Three questions run through every privacy issue: who holds the data, what may they do with it, and what happens when it leaks. Data once released cannot be recalled.
The digital divide
Access to technology is not equal. Cost, connection quality, disability and confidence all affect who can use online services well. As services move online by default, the people least able to access them are often those who most depend on them, and that is a genuine inequality rather than an inconvenience.
Automation and employment
Automation removes some jobs and creates others, but rarely in the same place or for the same people. A warehouse worker displaced by robotics is not straightforwardly retrained as a robotics engineer, and answers that assume they are miss the actual issue.
Emerging technologies
Artificial intelligence and machine learning. Systems trained on data rather than programmed with rules. They can find patterns people cannot, but they reproduce any bias in their training data and apply it consistently and at scale, which makes bias harder to notice and much larger in effect.
Autonomous vehicles. Potentially far safer than human drivers, and mobility for people who cannot drive. They raise unresolved questions about liability in a collision, about employment for professional drivers, and about how a vehicle should behave when harm is unavoidable.
Wearables and implants. Fitness trackers, smart watches and medical implants improve health and independence, and simultaneously produce a continuous record of a person's body that somebody else stores.
Cloud computing. Convenient, backed up and available anywhere, but personal data sits on servers owned by another company, possibly in another country under different laws, and nothing works without a connection.
- Ethical: questions of right and wrong, such as fairness, privacy and responsibility.
- Legal: the laws that apply, which you must be able to name.
- Cultural: how technology changes the way people live, communicate and work.
- Environmental: the materials and energy technology uses, and the savings it can make.
Writing the extended answer
The impacts question carries the largest single mark allocation on Paper 1 and is marked by levels rather than by counting points.
A structure that reliably reaches the top band:
- One sentence setting out the situation. Show you understood the question.
- The case for, two or three points, each developed to a consequence.
- The case against, developed to the same standard. This is where most answers thin out.
- Who is affected. The company, the customer, the employee and the wider public want different things, and naming that tension is what top band answers do.
- A conclusion that commits. A judgement, not a summary, and it must follow from what you actually argued.
A claim is half a mark. A claim with a consequence is a whole one. Train yourself to write "which means" after every assertion and the marks follow automatically.
However good the arguments, an evaluate question without a conclusion has not been answered. One sentence beginning "On balance" is enough, provided it commits to something.
Key terms you must be able to define
- Electronic waste
- Discarded electronic equipment, containing toxic materials and often dismantled unsafely.
- Digital divide
- The gap between those with good access to technology and those without.
- Machine learning
- A system trained on data to find patterns, rather than programmed with explicit rules.
- Algorithmic bias
- Unfair outcomes produced when a system learns patterns from biased training data.
- Cloud computing
- Storing data and running software on remote servers owned by a provider.
- Autonomous vehicle
- A vehicle that can drive itself without human control.
- Stakeholder
- A person or group affected by a decision or a technology.
Flashcards
Say the definition out loud before you flip the card. Retrieving it from memory is what builds recall, reading it again is not.
Reach the top grade on this topic
This is where the largest marks on Paper 1 are, and where most are lost.
Develop everything. Never leave a claim standing on its own. "Data centres use a lot of electricity, which means the carbon cost of a service continues for as long as it runs, not just when it was built."
Argue both sides even when you have a clear view. A one sided answer to an evaluate question cannot reach the top band however well written it is.
Name the stakeholders. Saying explicitly that the company benefits while the employee bears the cost is the kind of observation that separates top band answers from competent ones.
Conclude and commit. The conclusion must follow from your own argument, and it must actually decide something.
Mistakes that cost marks here
- Giving only the negative side of an impacts question.
- Listing impacts without developing any into a consequence.
- Ending an extended answer without a conclusion.
- Treating retraining as a complete answer to job losses from automation.
- Assuming cloud storage is automatically safer, when it moves the data into someone else's control.
Training a single large machine learning model can use as much electricity as several households do in a year. The environmental cost of computing is no longer only about the devices in front of you.
Knowledge check
Exam-style questions
Five written questions in the style of the real paper. Write a full answer, then let the marker check it against the mark scheme.
- LA negative impact such as energy use by data centres, e-waste or resource extraction
- LA positive impact such as fewer journeys or less paper
One negative impact is the very large amount of electricity consumed by data centres, both to run servers and to cool them, which continues for as long as a service exists. One positive impact is the reduction in travel that video conferencing and remote working allow, which removes carbon that would otherwise have been emitted by commuting and business flights.
- LThe system is trained on historic data from the organisation
- LThat data reflects past decisions which may themselves have been biased
- LThe system learns the statistical pattern rather than judging fairness
- LSo the bias is reproduced and applied to every application, at scale
A shortlisting system is trained on data about who the organisation has hired and promoted before. If those past decisions favoured one group, then the pattern present in the data is that successful candidates resemble that group, and that is precisely the pattern the system will learn. It has no concept of fairness and no way of knowing that the historic decisions were themselves unfair: it simply identifies the statistical relationship in what it was shown and applies it. The result is that a bias which previously depended on which manager happened to read an application is now applied identically to every single application, which makes it far larger in effect and much harder to detect, because the system produces a consistent and apparently objective output.
- LOnline services are available at any time without travelling
- LThe council saves money on buildings and staff, which can be spent elsewhere
- LThere is an environmental benefit from fewer journeys and less paper
- LSome residents have no reliable internet access or device
- LSome residents lack the confidence or ability to use online services, including older and disabled people
- LThe people most affected are often those who depend most on council services
- LPersonal data held online carries a security and privacy risk
- LReaches a justified conclusion, such as moving online while retaining some access route
There is a strong practical case. Online services are available at any hour without anyone having to travel or take time off work, which suits most residents better than an office open between nine and five. Closing buildings removes rent, heating and reception staffing costs, and a council under financial pressure can redirect that money into services rather than premises. There is a genuine environmental benefit too, since thousands of individual journeys and a large volume of printed forms disappear. The case against rests on who is excluded. A significant minority of residents have no reliable internet connection or no suitable device, and cost is the usual reason. A further group has access but not confidence, and that group is disproportionately older residents, people with disabilities affecting sight or dexterity, and people whose first language is not English. The difficulty is that these are frequently the same residents who most depend on council services such as housing, social care and benefits, so a decision framed as efficiency lands hardest on the people least able to absorb it. Concentrating personal data in online systems also creates a single valuable target, and a breach would expose exactly the sensitive information residents had no realistic choice about handing over. Different groups are affected very differently, and that matters to the judgement. The council gains, most residents gain convenience, and a minority loses access to services they are entitled to. On balance the council should move services online, because the benefits to the majority and to its budget are real, but it should not close every route in. It should keep a staffed telephone line and at least one physical office covering the whole area, fund assisted digital support through libraries and community centres, and commit to publishing how many residents use each route so that the decision can be revisited on evidence rather than on assumption.